Top class acting makes ordinary life extraordinary
★★★★
The Years was originally a book by a Nobel Prize winning French woman Annie Ernaux. It was adapted by a Norwegian woman Eline Arbo who directed it while working with a Dutch company. She has now brought the production to London in an English translation by Stephanie Bain. There were moments when I wondered whether the story of an ordinary life was worth all that pan European effort, but in the end it was the acting that sold it to me.
All the actors have familiar faces. Deborah Findlay, Gina McKee and Romola Garai have appeared regularly on stage and screen for decades. Anjli Mohindra and Harmony Rose-Bremner are young, up-and-coming actors who are already building big reputations.
All have the same ability to convey characters through the subtlest of gestures and expressions, and to communicate with confidence when they are centre stage. These are qualities essential to performing in this play, where the actors play the same person at different stages of her life, and the rest of the time take on the multiple other characters who are part of the story.
Harmony Rose-Bremner is Annie as a child fascinated by the family around her. Then Anjli Mohindra takes over as the joyous adolescent discovering, among other things, masturbation. And I must say I have never seen such an enthusiastic depiction of the act on stage.
In the other half of her life, as the middle-aged Annie, Gina McKee, with her trademark knowing smile, observes a new generation of adults and has the maturity to enjoy her own life more- especially the sex. Then in old age, Deborah Findlay takes over as the actual storyteller, looking at the present and all that has happened with a benign smile. If anyone could be said to take the honours in this masterclass of acting, it would be Romola Garai who takes on the mantle of the fresh young adult, learning about the harsh realities of relationships.
And it is quite an epic, taking a provincial French woman from childhood to old age. But what happens to her isn’t exceptional, with the important exception that the lives of ordinary women are rarely told on stage or anywhere else for that matter.
It gains much of its force from being told against the background of the second half of the twentieth century. In other words, it becomes a celebatory story of Women in our time or, depending on our age, the time of our parents and grandparents. So we run through post-Second World War austerity to the growth of consumerism, 1960s rebellion, the sexual liberation encouraged by the Pill, the triumph of free market capitalism, the beginning of a new millennium and 9/11. Lists of brand names and new consumer devices like the Walkman form a motif throughout the play.
The woman is first seen as a young girl, the youngest in the family, and ends up a grandmother, the oldest. In the course of the play, she discovers her sexuality, has non-consensual sex, an unwanted pregnancy, babies, a divorce, more pleasurable sex, copes with teenage children, and becomes an empty nester. The exploration of a life from it all being ahead to being behind is fascinating, and salutary. Annie describes how the memories ‘will all vanish at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of the grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents, also dead…And one day we’ll appear in our children’s memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born.’
Some of the events are upsetting, such as a harrowing illegal abortion (the play was stopped the night I was there because a member of the audience fainted, which I gather is not unusual), some are funny as when they all join in doing stretches with varying degrees of success as part of a Jane Fonda style fitness session.
But, in itself, this is not enough. Not because it’s about a woman but because a cushioned middle-class life is just not that interesting. It can be: even the most ordinary life has conflicts, challenges, threats, difficult relationships. But in this story, such things are deliberately played down. The alienating way of telling this trip of a lifetime, in which an actor describes what’s going on even as it happens, and with the characters around her almost anonymous, anaesthetises us from the dramas of her life.
The trip of a lifetime
Where we all gain, male and female, is in the story of time itself, and the way our memories remain with us, making the past always present. This is reinforced by all five incarnations, in the form of the actors, remaining on stage throughout. Another motif concerns the taking of photographs that hold one moment in time for a lifetime and beyond.
The story might still seem a trifling thing but for the performances and the creative elements of the production. The actors are all at the top of their game. They wear roughly the same costumes throughout and have few props but, because they speak with passion and mime so convincingly, we believe they are schoolchildren, disco dancing, naked in the bedroom, and so on.
In Juul Dekker’s sparse set, white cloths that represent the background to the photos, are rolled up to act as a baby or become a tablecloth, and end up, having been stained by wine, blood and other fluids of life, hanging as the backcloths to the life we have witnessed. Then, there’s the music. Harmony Rose-Bremner and Romola Garai sing beautifully and add extra depth to the moods of joy and sadness.
I don’t think the play carries the weight it aspires to, but the acting more than makes up for that.
The Years can be seen at the Harold Pinter Theatre from 24 January until 24 April 2025. Buy tickets direct from the theatre.
Paul was given a review ticket by the producer
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